Success Quote by Kevin Rollins

Rollins is puncturing a polite fiction in enterprise tech: “services” is pitched as a support system, but it often functions like a gravitational field that pulls the whole market toward whoever can bankroll the most consultants. The phrase “services army” is doing heavy work. It’s not the warm language of partnership; it’s militarized scale, implying a force deployed to secure territory - accounts, renewals, and long-term dependence - for “larger corporations.” That choice of metaphor frames the landscape as unequal by design, not by accident.

The specific intent reads like a strategic confession and a warning. If you’re a big buyer, you’re not just purchasing software; you’re purchasing the vendor’s manpower, attention, and bespoke integration effort. If you’re an SMB, you get the product, maybe a hotline, and a quiet message: adapt yourself to the system. Rollins is describing a two-tier economy where customization and hand-holding are premium goods, not standard rights.

Subtextually, he’s also describing why certain enterprise incumbents stay incumbents. Services scale with revenue, and revenue scales with services. Once a vendor builds an “army,” it becomes rational to chase whales, because whales fund the army that makes whale-chasing possible. The SMB market, framed as “cannot afford,” isn’t just smaller; it’s structurally underserved.

Context matters: this is the worldview of a businessman speaking from inside the enterprise machine, where “value” is often created not by code alone but by the expensive human layer required to make that code behave in messy real organizations.